270138 - Thunderbird should remind the user to actually attach a file that s/he refers to in the message.

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 244455

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, enhancement)

Description

[Matthias Jordan]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: 

This is a feature suggestion

Problem/motivation:

I know from my own experience using mail clients for years and through
observation of other users' problems that it is a common mistake to talk about a
file in an eMail message (like "as you can see in the attached spread sheet")
without actually attaching it. I.e. users often write about attaching a file but
forget to do so when they send the message, resulting in unnecessary follow-ups
like "cool, but where's the file"? and delay. The problem even gets worse when
sending to multiple recipients.

Idea:

Before actually sending the mail after the user pressed the "send" button, use
Bayesian filtering to determine if the user talked about attaching a file to
this message. If the Bayesian filter comes up with a high enough probability
that the user really wanted to attach a file but didn't do so, ask the user to
attach a file.

The training of the Bayesian filter could be done by processing saved messages
in the Sent folder that do have files attached.


Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Tuukka Tolvanen (sp3000)]

Unfortunately it would seem to be very difficult to come up with reasonable ui
to train on mistakes of the false negative kind. By the method of learning from
the actually sent mesages, and not interfering when the message does not appear
to need an attachment, it would also be self-reinforcing for negatives. So it
could end up performing worse than expected, by learning to make the same
non-attaching mistakes as you do :\

Comment 2

[Matthias Jordan]

A possible solution the the false negative kind of problems is handling them
like false negatives for Junk mail: tag them post-mortem. In most cases
recipients of the original message (that should have had an attachment but
hadn't) will notify the user and the original message will still be in the Sent
folder waiting to get tagged. This could even be supported by asking the user if
s/he wants to tag a message as "attachment missing" when s/he edits a message in
Sent, attaches a file and sends it again.

A possibly useful extension to the Bayesian approach may be a user configurable
stop word list that Thunderbird checks on in case the Bayesian filter thinks the
message is a negative. 

Comment 3

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 244455 ***